UC Berkeley Web Feature

BERKELEY – When
deciding what to read in her spare time, rural sociologist
Louise Fortmann might be influenced by a book's
topic, a friend's recommendation, or a
review. "Sometimes, honest, it's
the cover," she admits.

The two books that Fortmann describes here, however, made it onto her nightstand thanks
to her admiration for their authors. Fortmann had read
a previous book by Orhan Pamuk, who won the 2006 Nobel
Prize for Literature, and had been very impressed by
Richa Nagar's innovative and emancipatory work when
she met her at Stanford.

SnowOrhan Pamuk
Vintage, 2004

Playing with Fire:
Feminist Thought and Activism through Seven Lives in India
Sangtin Writers and Richa Nagar
Minnesota University Press, 2006

Snow and fire, Turkey and India, authors' names
that trigger my xenophobic spell checker — a
novel and a nonfiction account that connect around
the complexity of boundaries and the kinds of violence
they can produce. Read them both — you'll
be riveted!

In "Snow," Orhan Pamuk thoughtfully tells readers
like me, who never get the symbols, that snow (which
is omnipresent, almost a character, in the story) is
a boundary state between other forms of water. The
story — in
which Ka, an expatriate Turkish poet, returns from
Germany and is asked to look into the suicides of "head-scarf" girls
in the remote mountain town of Kars — leads the
reader around and through boundaries between religious
fundamentalism and secularism, metropolis and backwater,
Turkey and the West, rich and poor. And that's
all a barefoot rural sociologist is brave enough to
say about this amazing book.

"Playing
with Fire" also explores maintaining
and crossing boundaries, using blended diary entries
and reflections of nine contemporary Indian women,
the Sangtin Writers. "[S]angtin," the
book's introduction explains, is a term of "solidarity … used
by a woman to refer to her close female companion who
sees her through the trials and tribulations of life."
One fiercely defended boundary is right on the book
cover, which lists the authors as "Sangtin Writers
and Richa Nagar" rather than as "Sangtin
Writers," as
the nine authors had requested. Western academic presses,
for which collective creative processes are unimaginable
and unacceptable, require an Author.

Seven of the Sangtin Writers,
the autobiographers, worked as village mobilizers for
an Indian non-governmental organization for empowering
rural women; the eighth, Richa Singh, was a program
coordinator in the NGO; and Richa Nagar is a professor
at the University of Minnesota. The group worked together
for three years writing and discussing. The seven autobiographers
write (often with pain) of their struggles (and sometimes
failures) to overcome boundaries of caste, class, propriety,
religion, education, and sexism. As children,
wives, and daughters-in-law, they endure physical and
emotional deprivation, heavy workloads, beatings, and
mockery. The book is rich with reflections on the realities
of being a poor girl or woman in rural Uttar Pradesh, including the special cruelties that come if you are
Muslim or dalit, from an underprivileged caste "subject
to practices of untouchability."

Toward the end we learn that, having overcome the
boundaries in their own homes and communities, the
Sangtin faced hierarchical boundaries within the NGO
for which they worked. Higher rank in the organization
meant better travel accommodations, special seats in
meetings, higher allowances, higher salaries and outside
credit for the work that is done. Indeed — as
described in a postscript by Nagar — the
Sangtin Writers were attacked by the organization for
publishing the Hindi version of this book. The NGO
was by no means unique in this, nor in its pandering
to donor wishes, nor in its silencing the thoughts
and insights of lower-ranked workers. "Playing
with Fire" is at once an epic of women discovering
their own strengths and weaknesses and learning to
analyze and speak for themselves, and a cautionary
tale of the dangers of donor-funded "NGO-ization" in
which an unaccountable elite presumes to speak for
the dispossessed.